BitTorrent has been around for more than 10 years which is still alive and kicking today even though a lot of popular bittorrent tracker sites has shut down. Although BitTorrent is widely and commonly being used to distribute and download pirated materials such as cracked software or games, movies, TV episodes and MP3s, it is also being legitimately used to distribute the free Open Office, Ubuntu and many more… BitTorrent is merely a technology used to distribute files on the Internet and should not be automatically linked to piracy.
A lot of networks and even ISP are blocking or throttling users from downloading using BitTorrent because it is capable of sucking up the whole bandwidth, leaving very little or no bandwidth at all for other users. However if the BitTorrent client is properly configured with proper limits, it wouldn’t cause such problems on the network but unfortunately it is not that simple to configure for most basic computer users. One way to bypass BitTorrent restriction is to use an online downloader such as BitLet which I have previously covered in the blog. Here is another online BitTorrent client alternative called ZbigZ.
Basically ZbigZ acts as middleman by helping you to download the file using BitTorrent and then offers it to you for download once it has finished downloading. If the file has been previously requested by other users, the file will be made available to you much faster because it pulls the file directly from the storage instead of re-downloading the file. Everything works on HTTP protocol on the end user’s side and only a web browser with a working Internet connection is needed to download a file from BitTorrent using ZbigZ.
To download BitTorrent using ZbigZ, you will either need to upload the torrent file that can be downloaded from the tracker website or paste the torrent or magnet link to the box, followed by clicking the Go button. ZbigZ will either queue the file or start downloading depending on the load of their servers and offers it to you for download once it has finished downloading.
There are some restrictions for the ZbigZ free users but the premium paid users has all the features enabled and without limits. You can view the ZbigZ comparison matrix between the free and premium users at their official webpage. ZbigZ’s website stated that the free users are limited to 150KBps in download speed but as you can see from the video demo above, I was only getting around 50KBps when my Internet connection can download a maximum of 500Kbps. Since it’s free, I believe the download speed is offered at best effort.
I was curious to test the Premium account unlimited download speed so I paid RM2 for a 1 day subscription and tried downloading the same Open Office file. The download speed for ZbigZ premium account fluctuates quite badly from 200-400Kbps on 1 download thread. There are no visible download links where I can copy and paste the link to a download manager to download the file with multiple threads, so I used URL Snooper to get the direct download link and then downloaded the same file using JDownloader with 3 threads. It still fluctuates but this time at around 400-500KBps.
There are still room for improvements on the download speed for ZbigZ but it is definitely useful when you urgently need to download some files using BitTorrent from a network that you are connected to has placed a block on BitTorrent. Moreover you don’t even need to install or configure a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent, Vuze, BitComet on your computer.
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